


May

by D_Myrr



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Arranged Marriage, Drama & Romance, F/M, Sexual Content, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:48:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23175706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/D_Myrr/pseuds/D_Myrr
Summary: As tensions between Leaf and Uchiha soar, Hinata is given to Sasuke in marriage as a spy who's to keep an eye on the Double-Agent, Uchiha Itachi; however, with a coup on the horizon, Sasuke's caught between loyalty for brother and loyalty for family; and his choice may change Leaf's future as they know it. Semi-AU.
Relationships: Hyuuga Hinata & Uzumaki Naruto, Hyuuga Hinata/Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Itachi & Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

The hazy hallways of her mind contained, amidst other, unremarkable highlight reels, a spool of memory pertaining to that fateful morning. Hesitant love, a loose vestment that draped her life and lent it a rosy hue, had been stripped away, courtesy a missive; and dread, a dread that to this day had not dissipated, set in. The missive itself had made at her heart like a loosed crossbow bolt: and whereas in a heart armoured in ambition it would've only made the slightest indent; hers, touched as it was by a tender love, was rent in two— the pulsations of her passions poured out till she was quite bloodless and quite faint. That quaint missive told her tersely that she was to be married, a decree set forth by the Hokage himself; and though in secret she wailed, ranted and railed, there was nothing to be done, no recourse to be availed—she was, on the thirty first of March, to marry Uchiha Sasuke, for reasons unknown.

Unknown, as it turned out, was an exaggeration. She was told by her father in no uncertain terms, that being a waste of space, being above all else a burden to him and the clan, and being the spare, so to speak, she was lucky not to be banished into a branch family, seal seared across her forehead; that to marry into the Uchiha clan was an honour beyond her wildest imagination, an honour that her father had wheedled out of the honourable Hokage through entreaty and supplication. Hers was not to reason why, just to do as was asked of her; for, outside that, she had no rights whatsoever, being as she was—a pretty but inept girl, her father's greatest disgrace, the first firstborn in six generations to lose her birth-right to a younger sibling.

What her father did not know, was that her heart already belonged to another. But even if he had, it would've made no difference. For if she were to tell him that she was in love with the village idiot, she would be laughed out of the room. If she were to muster up a measure of defiance and stutter through her sentiments about his ardour, his passion, the depths of his person, the breadth of his ambition, she would at best be locked up and at worst— but no, no; that did not bear thought. This was her lot. She was born to be breeding stock. She was raised, so that she be told on the day of her wedding, by her sister, that she not fuck this up, that she was a loser, that she was unwanted, both whence she came from and where she was going to.

And though time had turned the dissonance that resonated in her breast into a detached quiescence, her sister had indeed foretold her fate. She was a maiden wed at the first sprinklings of spring, and a maiden still, though the showers had passed and the first fruits broken forth on the boughs. The arms of summer were weighed down by the alms of spring. Shadows on the streets elongated; the skies at night were star spangled affairs that spoke of a seething, sweaty, sticky passion, of a vigorous yet languid love. The freshets bountifully bequeathed the world with a school of iridescent fish, little hatchlings that streaked through kaleidoscopic patterns of sunbeams playing on the shimmering surface. Some sun-kissed days, the gurgle of streams and the warble of bursting bubbles broke forth. The air was an orgasm of scents and sounds—regal wings fluttered forth, lilted songs, like religious hymns, were hummed in twitters; and in little lisps, the melodious moans of human passion floated in the air. And every breeze brought with it a fragrance of faint jessamine; and the morning dew bore an opalescent hue as it dripped down fresh stalks of grass in her garden. And yet…yet, amidst all this opulence, she remained a mendicant: stripped of purpose; oscillating in identity between the unwanted Hinata Hyuga and the unloved Hinata Uchiha; bound in marriage; beggared of the love she once had, though that too remained stuck at the back of her brain, a siren song, a miracle of the mind, the coil of a six-year old soulful passion shrunken back into embryo, but not to dust, not nothing— and, to sum it all up, she remained frustrated, and her husband, an enigma.

Fine term, though: husband. She had a desire to huff bitterly at that. All she had met within this household, within this enclosure of grey paint, slatted windows, latticed walls, and nauseatingly formal rooms, was hostility. Her husband…she'd known him in passing at the academy— prodigy, a rival to the man she loved, ethereally beautiful yet always distant—yet never spoken to him, met him once before they were wed; and after the wedding, spent with him one morning, and waited in trepidation one night, for, that evening, he had been in such a foul mood, had simmered with such rage, such resentment, that she had trembled at the thought of spending the night in his company; yet he had never shown, not even to consummate their marriage; and next morning, her mother-in-law, the only soul in the house who ever made any sort of attempt to speak to her, had told her, not unkindly, that her _husband_ had left for a mission, the duration of which was unknown.

Over the past month, Hinata had come to the conclusion that Uchiha Sasuke hated her; that the distance his brother, for instance, kept, was sufficient evidence that all she was in this house was an unwelcome guest. And so too it was whenever she wandered outside, for the entire colony snuck at her apprehensive glances, and though the odd person stepped up, and the odd person made a strained attempt at being friendly, every undulating eyebrow seemed to send her way the same message: you are an outsider, you are a Hyuga, you would not be here if we had a say.

So she waited, harbouring in a mouldy corner of her mind an ever diminishing hope for emancipation; yet waited nonetheless, in the clammy embrace of bittersweet anticipation, for the return of a man she had been made to marry: a man she did not want, and a man who by no means seemed to want her. And all she wanted to know was why. Why her. Why was it she that had been plucked away from the sanctitude of her doomed, dissolving romantic dreams about Naruto; why thrust into this recurring social nightmare where day after day she slept alone, woke alone, sobbing softly— stranded amidst the unfriendly, ignored by her in laws, unwanted by her family, and with nowhere to go, and only her husband's benison to turn to.

And one gloomy evening, when the cricket with its incessant stridulating contended with the swallow's swelling strain for the world's attention, Sasuke returned.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

Every time he set foot within the premises of the Uchiha compound, Sasuke swapped the tattered robes of rationality for the satin ones of the sublime: space was suspended, time transcended, and a secret entry made into a sanctuary of the sacred. And it felt as natural as breathing, this sense of belonging. The wonderment, which lasted only an instant, turned back time, made him three, invoked in him a sort of religiosity: it made him see in his clansmen vestiges of the faith bleared, sandalwood smeared monk; in his parents, the deities that resided in many a marbled fane and breathed ditties arcane into the air profane; in his brother, the blanket of divinity, brother being the bedrock of community— he was the soil that lent supplement to shoots of defiance, the fume that, once inhaled, stole away all memories of mistreatment and supplanted them with dreams of dominance, the ensign that, in their darkest hour, when unfurled, would determine whether they be unyielding or undone. Itachi was as the very earth, from which arose the vengeful girth of ambition's boughs.

Then wonderment soured. And Sasuke. . . Sasuke in this moment was nothing. He was a perspiring pilgrim, trundling along in the coat-tails of the holy, bequeathed, like the moon, with a borrowed identity, and of no use—not to clan and not to brother. He felt, through the vanishing halo of wonderment, the hollowness of being with no prodigious talent: unable to help, lost in the sea of time, struggling to reconcile the storied, gloried past with a present penned by hands hostile. They were penned in, in this pigsty, rights dwindling like the last logs in a funerary pyre which in death birthed the embers of an idle repression; and here he was, chasing, like a rabid dog, after the last echoes of a lost generation.

And so too it was that sunny evening. He stepped into his community, and the central cistern, whilst filling up, did not sway to the sedate rhythms of water; it was, instead, a heaving heart, that in frothing hate defied its fate and raged in rebellion— their blood beat helplessly against the cemented confines of an oppressive rotundity, agitating that it be let flow, let free, or spilled. . . seditiously. Then the sentiment went; reality rent the splotched canvas of half intent and thoughts of wistful bent. The cause of freedom and the call for revolution were stifled deep, set to a troubled sleep, a sickly infant, nourished nonetheless on a never-ending supply of loathing and insularity. Sasuke made his way home.

A long rest this time, perhaps. Fatigue, flitting through his form like a coil of rope conjured by that truant, sleep, sapped his power to think; it was as obtrusive as a swarm of flies in a sink, this seeping sensation that slowly spread out from clavicle to ankle. A bed, a bed! But even half dead, he was already imagining the next mission— there would be a next mission. But only for him, his brother and a few others. _They own me_ , he thought. _They own me. You are never free. Only death begets freedom, for in death is simplicity. You are stripped of identity, mourned by family, set free, and you step away from the spiral of human foolishness and human sentiment and become one with the firmament._ Whereas life, he thought, half asleep, life was a complication: one cleaved for oneself a pathway clean, only to be derailed by muddled events unforeseen—like marriage.

Fucking marriage.

He did not hate Hinata Hyuga. No, no, he did not hate her at all. She just meant as much to him as the clod congealed on his clothes. He did not wish to blame her, for he knew it was in all probability hard for her too, perhaps more so than for him; yet he nonetheless felt towards her a degree of resentment. He had known he would someday be married, and that too without his consent— and he was all right with that; but he had not wished to add, at eighteen, the cufflinks of marriage to the trappings of a tenuous identity already stretched thin. Away with all the redundant adornment.

He entered his house, and his movements were soft enough that no one heard. He stood still a moment, then headed straight for his father's room. In the hallway he crossed _her,_ and considering the way she shook, the way her eyes dropped, the way her white face clouded with a fear so visceral, he felt for an instant an iota of pity. Then indignance replaced this—she acted as though he had sworn the foulest of oaths against her and her family. He put on an air of indifference and offered a short nod, then glided past, taking no heed of her stammered attempt at conversation.

Father was not home, and neither was Itachi. Sasuke glanced at the clock.

It was seven.

He remembered a time when father was home by five; a happier, healthier time, when father's face hadn't been smitten by a smattering of splotches or bitten by the serpent of tension, when the creased mask of death that he now wore was healthy skin which spoke of the character within. He remembered that they had a bigger house on the other side of the village; he was free to mingle with everyone then, and not certain someones that belonged to clan alone. He remembered a time when father smiled. When mealtimes were happy, when mother hummed freely with a sparkle of joy in her eye, when not every conversation devolved into an argument over the web of order from the other side, delivered like a stake through the heart—the Leaf was the _other_. He remembered a time when they were not so tired, so formal, so distant. Even now, there came the odd instance of goodwill, that like a mirage would shimmer through in the desolation of the dining table. Then Itachi would smirk and father's eyes would soften and mother would let loose a throaty laugh; and Sasuke . . . Sasuke would be happy. Happy. Happy, if only for a few moments, because his family would go back to being a family, and not strangers bound to each other's company by a thread of duty. He remembered all this still, though the memories were so remote and so far removed, that it felt at times like the happiest dream he had woken from.

He contemplated going to the kitchen to greet mother, but mother would tell him that he talk to his wife; she would chastise him, as she had on the day of his wedding, for not taking his duties towards the girl more seriously, and for seemingly resenting her for no fault of hers at all.

So he skipped that, in the hope she would understand and forgive; made his way to his room, blessedly empty; and, without changing, collapsed into his cushy bed. He was asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.


End file.
